Long Term Care Facilities Choice Factor Analysis

poster abstractIntroduction: The largest generation in America has reached retirement age and will continue to do so until the year 2030. This has caused tremendous growth of long-term care facilities and warrants investigation into these facilities. The goal of this study is to understand and quantify incoming residents’ factors of primary importance as assessed by themselves and familial decision makers when choosing a long-term care facility. Methods: Three hundred fifty-four adults who had previously been involved in choosing a long term care facility for a loved one were paid up to $1.25 to complete a questionnaire online via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Participants rated importance of 10 factors involved in decision-making (e.g., price, social environment, medical care availability) on a scale of 1-100. Results: The result of data cleaning culminated in 287 quality survey responses, from which the data was analyzed. One hundred fifty-five of the participants (54%) were female and 1 ( 1, accounting for 55.52% of variance. Factor 1-Comfort and factor 2-Practicality were significantly intercorrelated (r = 0.43). The most important factors were cleanliness, staff (non-physician), and atmosphere (mean scores of 89.43, 85.58, & 84.62 respectively). The least important factors were facility layout and off-site activities (mean scores of 66.64 & 48.43 respectively). Conclusion: Overall, many factors go into decision on long-term care facilities, with the most important factors likely involving cleanliness, staff, and atmosphere. The results of this research can be utilized in long term care facility selection and provide a platform for facilities to adapt to their residents. Mentor: Melissa A. Cyders. Department of Psychology, IUPUI School of Science. Funding provided by the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP)

Behavioral Measurement of Sensation Seeking Shows Positive Association with Risky Behaviors

poster abstractSensation seeking (SS; the tendency to seek out experiences that are highly varied, novel, and intense, and the willingness to take risks in order to have such experiences) is strongly related to risky behavior. However, most prior research has relied on self-report assessments of SS, which are limited by subject biases and lack of insight. This study is designed to develop and optimize a behavioral assessment of SS to be used in future brain imaging studies, and to evaluate the relationship of this behavior with selfreported SS and risky behaviors. The novel behavioral SS task employed in this study presents participants with olfactory sensory stimuli and assesses the individual’s preference to seek varied, novel, and intense sensations, with the risk of an unpleasant stimulus (“Varied”; e.g. strong orange, rose, linalyl acetate, and propionic acid) vs. weaker and mildly pleasant sensations (“Standard”; weak vanillin, orange, and rose) across two twenty-trial sessions. Hypothesis: greater preference for “Varied” odors will correlate with self-reported SS and risky behaviors. Odorants are presented as a 1-sec burst via an airdilution olfactometer within a filtered airstream. Participants are being recruited from the Introduction to Psychology class at IUPUI (currently n = 11 total, mean age (SD) = 21.2, (5.4), n = 8 women, n = 7 Caucasian). The mean preference for “Varied” was 50%, range = 28-75%. Preference for “Varied” showed a moderate relationship with negative risky behaviors (r = 0.35) and SS (Zuckerman Thrill/Adventure seeking subscale; r = 0.48), suggesting that the behavioral task is associating as expected with these self-report variables. These preliminary data suggests the feasibility of behavioral SS assessment; behavioral characterization will permit examination of how SS influences brain activity, without the limitations of self-report. How SS affects choice of and reactions to new and exciting experiences has important research and clinical implications

Quantifying Behavioral Sensation Seeking With the Aroma Choice Task

Our goal was to develop a behavioral measure of sensation seeking (SS). The Aroma Choice Task (ACT) assesses preference for an intense, novel, varied, and risky (exciting) option versus a mild, safe (boring) option using real-time odorant delivery. A total of 147 healthy young adults completed 40 binary choice trials. We examined (1) intensity and pleasantness of odorants, (2) stability of responding, (3) association with SS self-report, and (4) association with self-reported illicit drug use. Participants’ preference for the “exciting” option versus the safe option was significantly associated with self-reported SS (p < .001) and illicit drug use (p = .041). Odorant ratings comported with their intended intensity. The ACT showed good internal, convergent, and criterion validity. We propose that the ACT might permit more objective SS assessment for investigating the biological bases of psychiatric conditions marked by high SS, particularly addiction. The ACT measures SS behaviorally, mitigating some self-report challenges and enabling real-time assessment, for example, for functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)